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Academic Biography

Professor Nicolas Martin
obtained both his BA and his PhD in social anthropology at the London School of
Economics and Political Science (LSE). After
completing his PhD in 2009— based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in
rural Pakistan and entitled ‘Politics, Patronage and Debt Bondage in the
Pakistani Punjab’— and until 2012 he was a teaching fellow at the LSE
Anthropology Department. During this
time he taught courses in political and legal anthropology, economic
anthropology, the anthropology of South Asia, and a course on ethnographic text
and film. He also produced academic
articles on agrarian change, the evolving nature of patron-client ties, and on debt
bondage, and a book entitled Politics, Landlords
and Islam in Pakistan that was published by Routledge in 2015. The book explores the above themes in greater
detail, but also examines electoral politics, factionalism, violence and electoral fraud,
as well as the relationship between Sufi Islam and landed power.

In 2012 Professor Martin
became a Senior Research Fellow at the University College London department of
Anthropology after he and a team of researchers obtained research grants from
both the European Research Council (ERC) and Economic and Social Research
(ESRC) to study the tightening nexus between politics, crime and business
across South Asia. In 2013 he embarked
upon fifteen months of fieldwork in an agrarian region of the Indian Punjab. Building on his previous research interests,
Professor Martin has been examining the relationships between clientelistic politics,
violence and inequality in rural Punjab.
In 2015 he published an article in Economic
and Political Weekly examining the limits of lower caste political
assertion. He is currently writing articles and planning his second book based
on his recent fieldwork in India. Topics
include: ‘bossism’, violence and extortion, electoral malpractice,
factionalism, and the changing relationship between caste and class. During the
autumn of 2015 Professor Martin was a visiting lecturer at the anthropology
department of the University of Bern where he taught a course entitled
‘Politics, Economy and Society in India’.

Research Interests

Selected Publications

Mafia Raj: The Rule of Bosses in South Asia (South Asia in Motion) by L. Michelutti et al. (eds.). Stanford University Press.

2018

'Corruption and Factionalism in Contemporary Punjab: An ethnographic account from rural Malwa.' In Modern Asian Studies, 52(3), pp. 942-970.

2017

Martin, N. and Michelutti, L. 'Protection Rackets and Party Machines.' In Asian Journal of Social Science, 45(6), pp. 693-723.

2015

Politics, Landlords and Islam in Pakistan. Delhi & London: Routledge.

2015

‘Rural Elites and the Limits of Scheduled Caste Assertiveness in the in rural Malwa, Punjab.’ In Economic and Political Weekly Volume L, No. 52.

2014

‘The Dark Side of Patronage in the Pakistani Punjab.’In A. Piliavski(ed)Patronage as the Politics of South Asia, Delhi: CUP.

2013

‘Class, Patronage and Coercion in the Pakistani Punjab and in Swat,’ in M. Marsden and B. Hopkins (eds) Beyond Swat: History, Society and Economy along the Afghanistan-Pakistan Frontier, Columbia/Hurst.

2013

‘The Dark Side of Political Society: Patronage and the Reproduction of Social Inequality.’ Journal of Agrarian Change. Doi:10.1111/joac.12039.

2009

‘The Political Economy of Bonded Labour in the Pakistani Punjab.’ In Contributions to Indian Sociology Volume 43, No.1 (February).